Once upon a time I studied Literary Studies in which you study the world through literature. Novels are actually the microcosmos or glasses if you will with which you see the world. So it goes far beyond knowing for instance from which perspective a story has been written. A novel tells you something about the context in which it was written, it’s a historical document, a reflection of the Zeitgeist and answers questions about society, politics and identity. Especially this last topic fascinated me (and still does). Because what is identity? Wikipedia says: “Identity is the unity of being. The image that someone has of himself is being called selfimage of selfconcept. There are moreover several kinds of the understanding of identity, like personal, genetic, social, cultural and national identity.” This fascination for identity that knows so many faces ultimately resulted in my final thesis in which I studied the concept in the work of the South-African author J.M. Coetzee. To further analyze his novels I employed psychoanalysis that undertakes a remarkable attempt to comprehend ‘identity’. After literature came culture. I started a research master Cultural Analysis that took me further from literature to film, theatre, photography etc. In other words […]